


We Are To Them As They Are To Us

by Jo_busch_got_booty



Category: None - Fandom
Genre: Cute, Dragons, F/F, Family, Fantasy, Love, Monsters, NaNoWriMo, Romance, Trolls, a lot of dragons, a lot of rambling
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-07
Packaged: 2018-03-16 15:42:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3493808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jo_busch_got_booty/pseuds/Jo_busch_got_booty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Other worlds have bedtime stories too, we just never expected them to be about us.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter  1

I grew up in a smaller town, perched at the base of a mountain the same way it had been for almost three thousand years—that’s what my grandfather told me, anyway, and he’s known to exaggerate the truth. My mother always used tell us about the bedtime stories he would come up with, trolls stealing his shoes, goblins hitting him up for cash, but him somehow deflecting them with one broken arm. We never believed him, of course, (well, aside from the troll story, it has happened to all of us at least once)but it was still fun to lean back, close our eyes, and let his words wash over us. Peter, my younger brother, always complains that I spoil the story for him, but it isn’t my fault that I’ve heard them all before—and it isn’t my fault that he seems to believe them all, either.  
The trek to my grandfather’s house is a long one. After Grandmother died, he chose to move out of the house that my mother had been raised in, decided to pack up everything he owned and move to a town miles away, just south of Merrilay. We all complained about the journey to and fro, the horses weren’t that fast, and there was no possible—er, logical, anyway—way to get there without traveling through the giant forest. The forest itself was beautiful: tall, lean trees reached into the sky, sunlight filtering through the leaves, a clear contrast to shadows leaning into my window at night time—but it took days to reach him, and therefore we didn’t see him nearly as much as we would like to. However, the second we climbed off the backs of our steeds, he was in the stables to say hello, and offer big hugs and kisses. That’s something I loved about my grandfather, he never wasted a second with anyone he cared about.  
Everyone in town knows my grandfather, and he’s more than infamous for his stories, so much to the point where he could seldom walk down the road without being called out to tell a tall tale. He made a majority of his livings by putting on puppet shows in the town square, never did he charge, but there was always a suggestive tip jar at the base of the homemade stage for tips. Parents would slip gold and silver coins into the jug while their children’s eyes were glued to the open curtains, if only to keep their childish wonder alive for a few more minutes. Mother tells me that most of the puppets are dolls that Grandmother had made for her when she was the same age as most of the children in the audience—the little children, not the older kids who believe themselves too old to listen and be interested, but still young enough to listen with wide ears from behind a nearby tree.  
Our last journey to my grandfather’s house was in the middle of a particularly cold winter. In fact, there was such a blizzard that we considered not visiting at all in fear of getting caught in the middle of it. Sure enough, however, the eve of the morning we were meant to leave, our bags were packed and placed by the door in the great room. My family had opted against bringing our cat (and oh, she made a fuss about that, let me tell you, going on about how ungrateful her humans were, as if we had something to be grateful about. All she ever does is sit there and bathe herself, and I’m choosing not to mention all of the times she ruined our dinner by getting into the chicken we had bought from the butcher earlier that day.)and even the horses seemed reluctant to exit their warm stables and head out onto unpaved paths. The locals only shovel snow out of the town and off of the main roads, anything even close to a dirt path gets left to melt into mud come spring.  
Once we got moving, however, the steeds warmed up, and slowly we began to, as well. The morning was quiet, groggy, and a few times, Peter had to toss a small ball of snow my way to insure that I didn’t fall asleep and topple into the snow—as funny as it might have been, he recounts every time he tells the story. For the first two days, our journey was outrageously uneventful, travel games, like I-spy, and spot the tree were nearly impossible, unless, of course, we wanted to consistently guess white and have the answer be snow or, if we were feeling daring, ice. Trees were almost impossible to identify, as they were all coated in thick, white powder, and while the icicles hanging from them looked beautiful, they made it difficult and dangerous to navigate. It was almost like a game, but when we made light of our travels and tried to have fun, Father would reprimand us, and warn that we were going to get hurt. At least that would make the ride more exciting.  
On the third evening, we spotted a dragon in the distance. This wasn’t anything particularly new, we had seen a few on other trips to Grandfather’s house, but they had always been ice dragons, who, though not necessarily pleasant, were neutral, and would leave us alone so long as we did the same to them. This beast was too far away to be sure, Father informed us, and on Mother’s suggestion, we took a slight detour to avoid finding out. Peter suggested we stop for dinner around noon, but we all shot him down; we told him to eat on his horse— I think that we were all sick of the never varying landscape, and our continued inability to see the tip of a mountain above the trees. Surely we should have been there by now, but no one said a word of their thoughts.  
Finally, after nearly 96 hours of travel at a slow gait, a ring of smoke rose above the closest tree, and the horses seemed to speed up at the promise of warm stalls and a big meal. When the first log of the snug cabin came into view, Peter and I launched ourselves off of our steeds. We knew mighty well they would show themselves to their rooms, and if they didn’t, they would wait for us to. The moment our calls pierced the air, I saw the curtain on the front window shift, as if someone were looking in from the side. Or, at the very least, near the window, and their movement blew it along. Knowing Grandfather, it was probably the former… and nobody was complaining.  
“Annabelle! Peter!” His enthusiasm and energy never failed to amaze me. He was going on eighty, and surely around the age to need a cane, especially considering the supposed adventures he had gone on in his prime, but he was in fine enough health without one. Whenever we would ask, he would give us a tale about a doctor who opened him up and replaced all the bad parts with new material. Mother always grew pale at that one, and would often shush him, complain that she didn’t want such nasty images running through our (or even hers, for that matter) heads. Peter and I didn’t mind, though, there wasn’t much else to do besides listen to Grandfather’s silly (or, really, often elaborate) tales again or, on occasion, for the first time.  
Grandfather wasn’t one for elegance or excess, and only had two bedrooms. The back room he kept tidy for my parents, but my brother and I stayed in his room for the duration of our trip, often lulled to sleep by his steady snoring. The first night we were there, we collapsed onto the bed and fell asleep without even situating ourselves onto the pillows. Normally, we slept on either side of Grandfather, but that night, Peter and I were too tired to argue over who gets what side and both toppled, exhausted, onto the right side of the bed. Grandfather kissed us on the forehead, and though we were both in too deep of a sleep to hear him, he told a story into the night air whose darkness was broken only by the small flame of his pipe and the shining stars projected onto the ceiling by a colander with a candle under it.


	2. Chapter Two

The next morning, Peter and I awoke to the smell of cooking pig and eggs. Our eyes widened—we only ever got breakfast like that at home on a birthday—and we both leaped up as if the bed was on fire. Grandfather’s room is what my mother would refer to as untidy. He would argue back that it was controlled chaos, but I believe that it was somewhere in between the two descriptions. Drawers hung open messily, but the clothes made their way into them (albeit sloppily). His bookshelves were filled with books, and they were stuffed wherever it was that they could be in the room. On the shelves, some paperbacks were stood upright, and lined up in rows, others were stacked to the roof of the shelf and another pile began next to them. They didn’t seem to be in any particular order, not by author or genre, or even by the colour of the spine, but whenever Grandfather ventured into the stack for one particular book, he knew exactly where it was. Just like magic. But in our haste to exit the room into the kitchen, my brother and I found ourselves tripping over our own shoes, blankets. One of Grandfather’s helper trolls just barely caught me before I slammed my head against the corner of his open dresser. I paused just long enough to thank my savior, before continuing to make my way out the room, down the hall, and into the mildly smoky kitchen. I got there just before Peter and, as tradition calls it, got my plate of food first. He grumbled that I took all the crispy pieces of bacon, and that my legs were longer, and that I was closer to the door, but when I pointed out that he could have pulled ahead when I fell, he grew silent. As per the usual. He never won, although one year on his birthday, I let him. Grandfather winked at me, before returning to the conversation that he had been having with Father. He was asking about the sale of our armor, something about a weekly rate, but I tuned them out. Truthfully, I was more worried about my meal than how much money we would earn by using a little more iron to make breastplates. The rest of the day was boring. Peter and I dug a deck of playing cards out of a drawer and asked Grandfather to teach us how to play a game that wasn’t Go Fish or Crazy Eights. It was too cold to go outside and race on the horses or… or really anything else. It was almost too cold to shiver. Somehow, though, despite spending our day curled up next to the fireplace, we were exhausted come bedtime, and when the call came to brush our teeth and change into our sleepwear, our protests were muffled. Peter and I both wrapped ourselves up in our blankets, and snuggled up against the pillows, happily awaiting for Grandfather to come in and tell us a story, like he always does, but he took his time in making his way into the room. “How about something new?” Grandfather asked, as he sat down in the rocking chair that was expertly wedged in the nook between the bookshelf and the end table. “Grandfather,” I said pointedly, “I think we’ve heard all of your stories already. How could we hear something new?” “You couldn’t have heard them all,” He replied with a chuckle and a shake of his head. He lit his pipe and leaned back, the vague outline of his face was visible against the mild fire. It was green tonight, it must have been the new mood smoke he was telling father he wanted to try. Green… That was content, I believe. He blew out, and the smoke had a green hue around it that separated and seemed to rain down gently onto us as it hit the ceiling. “But we’ve at least heard a good bit of them,” Peter answered, eyes wide. “Well hush, and you’ll hear something new,” Grandfather ordered, and we did as we were told. Peter and I exchanged a glance, and then situated ourselves comfortably, closing our eyes and letting Grandfather’s words wash over us.


	3. Chapter Three

There are other lands besides our own. Grandfather had never thought so, until he ended up in one. It didn’t seem so different at first. He had, as he put it, “landed” (for there really was no better word for it) in a field right off of a farmhouse, the farmer had to wake him up to get to his shed, as Grandfather was laying across the doorway. There was no mistaking the early morning sun. Light flittered through the tree branches of the east, until the beautiful sight was rather rudely blocked by a towering figure whose expression was nothing but a silhouette in front of the light. Even without the outline of a mouth, Grandfather could tell that the farmer was unhappy about this trespasser. To be fair, who wouldn’t be? But my grandfather was confused as well, and after a long-- mainly one-sided-- conversation with the man (“Sir, I’m not sure why I’m here myself. No, Sir, I don’t remember getting here. I woke up this way. I’m greatly sorry for being an inconvenience, Sir.”) the farmer offered him a place to stay for the night until he could find his way home. The farmer led grandfather back to the house-- “they had so much land,” he informed me, “that the sun was far above the trees by the time we got inside.” I find that to be more of a perception situation, myself, but he insisted on it-- and inside to explain to his wife just what was going on, and to please set another plate at the breakfast table. There were no questions until the Farmer came back from doing his morning chores and their children came down to eat. The first person to trot down the stairs was a little girl. She was groggy, her hair a bird’s nest atop her head, night clothes wrinkled and faded, as if they were her favourite pair and worn constantly. She couldn’t have been much older than four or five, and she just barely reached Grandfather’s hip in height. (he says he was a lot taller when he was younger, and that a witch shrunk him, but I’m not sure that I believe him.) But when that girl smiled, it lit up the whole room. She seemed happy enough when she came down, albeit sleepy, but when her eyes landed onto her father, her whole face split wide into a grin. “Daddy!” what had started as a pleasant jog down the stairs turned into a sprint, stopping four ledges from the bottom to disregard the ground completely, and she leaped excitedly toward her father, emerald eyes brimming with glee. My grandfather couldn’t help but feel a twinge of homesickness, though he couldn’t have been away for very long, a night at the most certainly. He laughed nervously, and quickly asked if he could help with anything at all, guilt taking him over at the realization that he had disturbed this family’s meal. The Missus dismissed him quickly, a grateful smile playing at her face. “There ain’t much we can do until Charlie comes down,” she explained. “he shouldn’t be long, hes was asleep before Paul and I even went up to bed last night. Teenagers do love their sleep. I’m May.” May wiped a hand on her apron and held it out to grandfather. “Francis,” he replied, accepting her hand gratefully. “Thank you greatly for having me.” “Of course.” May went on to explain how they didn’t get many visitors out there in the country. Back when she and Paul lived in the city, when she was still pregnant with Charlie, they got callers constantly, it was as if they had a revolving door instead of a storm door. People were in and out, cooing over the baby, and how cute May looked. “But then we moved out here for more of an income,” she said. “And we certainly make more money farming than we ever did sitting around in office buildings. I still teach though, gratefully. I would go mad sitting around in this house all day, seven days a week. I mean, one can only watch so many Lifetime movies before they’ve seen them all.” “Lifetime… movies?” But Francis’s voice was drowned out in the clomping of footsteps. The wooden steps protested the heavy steps of the figure making its way down them. He put together that this must be Charlie, Paul and May’s eldest child, when he felt eyes boring into him. “Who are you?” a small voice asked from below him. Grandfather looked down into big, wondering eyes. The little girl didn’t seem hostile, just curious, and so he responded with a wide smile when he was sure he wouldn’t be accused of patronizing her. “I’m Francis, Ma’am,” he said politely, kneeling down to offer out a hand to shake. “And what would be your name?” “I’m Wendy,” she announced. (Peter interrupted with an exclamation of “That’s Mother’s name!” but Grandfather and I shushed him.) And then, as if to prove that she knew, the little girl held up three fingers proudly. “I’m four-- oh.” Quickly, she raised another finger and resumed her beaming. “How old are you?” “Why, you’re awfully smart for a four year old,” Grandfather awarded happily. “I’m seventeen-- can you hold up that many fingers?” Wendy looked down at her hands contemplatively, before holding up a solid eight fingers and nodding enthusiastically. “Yeah!” she announced with so much confidence that Grandfather didn’t have the heart to correct her. He didn’t condone it, either, and thankfully he didn’t have to because someone else grabbed his attention. “Francis--” The boy in front of him was jostled by an unseen hand, and he turned to glare unhappily at his mother before correcting himself. “Er-- Mr. Francis. Would you like to take a seat?” Grandfather nodded gratefully, and took a seat beside the head of the table-- Knowing enough to ration that it was where the man of the family sat. To his surprise, however, May moved there, countered by, less surprisingly, Paul. It was strange, foreign. Grandfather had never been completely convinced by gender roles-- Why couldn’t the women do the hard work? Have fun?-- but his own father had been bound to them like a ball and chain. Every night at dinner, he would take one end of the table, like some form of gender spectrum, and his father on the other. (“It was like saying that I was better, more powerful than my own mother,” Grandfather muttered under his breath, “it was in poor taste.”) No one seemed rather unhappy with this seating arrangement, or shocked, even, and so Grandfather swallowed his questions and decided it best not to question. Each family had their own traditions, after all. His eyes wandered over the table, and he slowly raised his fork to begin eating the meal in front of him, but all of the heads around him began bowing. “Give us this day, our daily bread…” They were praying. Politely, Grandfather bowed his own head, and let his hands go together, fingers intertwining awkwardly together like a loose, uncomfortable knot. His house hadn’t been religious, going to the house of worship only on holidays like Christens Eve-- it was unacceptable to skip out on that in such a small town. (“We were really hypocrites,” Grandfather informed us offhandedly. “We told people to go to church, worship under the name of God-- that it would fix any problems with people or the world, but we barely touched the steps of the church ourselves. Our fingers barely brushed the marble.”) In a house where it was expected, however, he closed his eyes and waited in silence until the droning begging and thanking ended. Then followed a muttered "Amen."


End file.
